Coversheet This is the accepted manuscript (post-print version) of the article. Contentwise, the post-print version is identical to the final published version, but there may be differences in typography and layout. How to cite this publication Please cite the final published version: Skaaning, S-E., Gerring, J., & Bartusevicius, H. (2015). A Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy. Comparative Political Studies, 48(12), 1491-1525. DOI: 10.1177/0010414015581050 Publication metadata Title: A Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy Author(s): Svend-Erik Skaaning Journal: Comparative Political Studies DOI/Link: 10.1177/0010414015581050 Document version: Accepted manuscript (post-print) General Rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognize and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. This coversheet template is made available by AU Library Version 1.0, October 2016
A Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy Svend-Erik Skaaning Professor, PhD Department of Political Science Aarhus University Bartholins Allé 7 8000 Aarhus C skaaning@ps.au.dk +45 61335244 John Gerring Professor, PhD Department of Political Science Boston University jgerring@bu.edu Henrikas Bartusevičius Postdoc, PhD Department of Political Science Aarhus University henrikas@ps.au.dk
Recent years have seen an efflorescence of work focused on the definition and operationalization of democracy. The concept serves as an ongoing touchstone in methodological discussions of concept formation (e.g., Goertz, 2006; Schedler, 2012; Seawright & Collier, 2014) and new democracy indices continually appear, which are periodically reviewed and critiqued (e.g., Armstrong, 2011; Coppedge & Gerring et al., 2011; Gleditsch & Ward, 1997; Knutsen, 2010; Munck, 2009; Vermillion, 2006). One way to categorize this growing corpus of indicators is by the type of scale employed to measure the key concept (democracy) binary, ordinal, or interval. Binary indices include the Democracy-Dictatorship ( DD ) index produced by Przeworski and collaborators (Alvarez et al., 1996; Cheibub et al., 2010) and an index produced by Boix, Miller, and Rosato (2013, hereafter BMR ). Ordinal measures include the Political Rights ( PR ) index and the Civil Liberty ( CL ) index, both produced by Freedom House (2013), along with the Polity2 index drawn from the Polity IV database (Marshall et al., 2013). Interval measures include the Index of Democracy produced by Vanhanen (2000), the Contestation and Inclusiveness indices produced by Coppedge, Alvarez, and Maldonado (2008), and the Unified Democracy Scores ( UDS ) produced by Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton (2010). There is much more to a democracy index than its choice of scale. Even so, scaling is a critical issue in measurement and one that has garnered considerable controversy, especially as concerns the virtues and vices of binary measures (contrast Elkins, 2000 and Cheibub et al., 2010). Critics of binary indices point out their reductionist elements: all features of a regime must be reduced to a single coding decision, producing binary sets that are highly heterogeneous and borderline cases that may not fit neatly into either category. Binary indices, by construction, lack discriminating power. Defenders counter that if the definition of these binary sets is properly grounded in theory, the two-part typology may succeed in identifying from the multifarious elements of democracy that condition, or set of conditions, that serves a crucial role in political life (see Collier & Adcock, 1999). However, this is not an easy claim to sustain witness the proliferation of binary indices that identify different defining conditions of democracy. 1 We take for granted that different sorts of scales are useful for different purposes. Our aim is thus not to subsume or replace extant measures of democracy. The discipline is well served by a variety of measures for this central concept. Instead, we propose a new method of scale 1 A short list would include DD and BMR already discussed as well as Bernhard, Nordstrom, and Reenock (2001 and the overview of electoral democracies by Freedom House (2013).
construction that combines the differentiation of an ordinal scale with the distinct categories of a typology. Specifically, we propose to operationalize electoral democracy as a series of necessary-andsufficient conditions arrayed in an ordinal scale. We refer to this scaling procedure as lexical. The resulting lexical index of electoral democracy, partly based on novel data construction, covers all independent countries of the world from 1800 to 2013 and is thus the most comprehensive measure of democracy currently available. 2 It incorporates binary coding based on factual characteristics of regimes and in this way avoids the problem of subjective judgments by coders and the mashup quality of non-binary indices (Ravallion, 2011). However, each binary coding is aggregated together using the cumulative logic of a lexical scale with seven levels. In this fashion, we arrive at an index that performs a classificatory function each level identifies a unique regime type as well as a discriminating function. This approach to measurement offers theoretical and empirical advantages over other methods of representing the complex concept of electoral democracy that may be useful in certain settings. The first section of the paper shows that extant data sets of democracy fall short in simultaneously providing fine-grained discriminatory power and meaningful categories. The second section develops conditions that define our lexical index of electoral democracy. The third section discusses how this index is coded through history and across the universe of independent states. The fourth section deals with the anticipated validity of the coding. The fifth section explores features of the lexical index, which is compared with extant indices in the sixth section. The seventh section applies the new measure to the question of state repression, showing how its fixed meanings to the different levels inform the interpretation of statistical relationships in a way that is not accessible through conventional democracy indices. The eight section offers additional thoughts on the application of the lexical index to causal questions pertaining to democracy. We conclude with a summary of the value that a lexical approach to measurement may add to our understanding of electoral democracy. 1. Discrimination vs. Meaningful Categories 2 The dataset (and future editions) can be downloaded at www.ps.au.dk/dedere and http://thedata.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/skaaning. 2
The Freedom House indices recognize seven categories each, and the Polity2 index twenty-one categories. 3 In contrast to binary indices, the levels in these ordinal indices are not qualitatively different from each other. A 3 on the PR, CL, or Polity2 scale signifies that a polity is more democratic than a country coded as 2 but it does not identify specific traits that distinguish polities falling into each of these categories. Extant ordinal indices identify thus countries with more or less democracy but not different kinds of democracy. In this respect, they resemble interval scales. Interval indices of democracy are generally second-order indices. That is, they are constructed by aggregating together information provided by other democratic indices through factor analysis (Contestation and Inclusiveness) or Bayesian latent variable models (UDS). The exception is Vanhanen s Index of Democracy. However, the distribution of data on this index is so highly skewed and so evidently censored nearly 50 percent of the observations are at the zero point of a 100-point scale that it loses discriminatory power. 4 Thus, our discussion of interval measures focuses on the Contestation, Inclusiveness, and UDS indices. The purpose of a well-constructed interval index is to identify fine distinctions among entities. The Contestation, Inclusiveness, and UDS indices achieve this goal as well as can be expected. However, the goal of reducing the plenitude of characteristics associated with democracy to a single unidimensional index is elusive. It is elusive because the concept itself is multidimensional and because extant indicators are limited in their purview (Coppedge & Gerring et al., 2011). An appropriate response is to define the resulting index in a carefully delineated way as representing only one dimension of a multifaceted concept. Thus, Coppedge, Alvarez, and Maldonado (2008) describe one component from their principal components analysis as Contestation and the other as Inclusiveness. The UDS is simply described as a measure of democracy. However, these are ex post descriptions resulting from a rather ad hoc process, putting together myriad indices whose definition and construction is often ambiguous and lacks justification with a statistical model and labeling the central tendencies resulting from that model as X. It is unclear, for example, whether an index labeled Inclusiveness includes all measures relevant to that concept and no measures irrelevant to that concept and whether the included elements are aggregated in an appropriate way. Aggregation techniques are virtually limitless, given 3 The Polity2 index is less discriminating than it appears; countries tend to bunch in two areas toward the bottom of the index and at the very top producing a strongly bimodal distribution 4 In addition, Vanhanen s index has been criticized for low construct validity (Munck, 2009). 3
that researchers must make many choices in the construction of a factor analysis or Bayesian latentvariable model. 5 If all indices are in some sense arbitrary, they are arbitrary in strikingly different ways. The arbitrariness of a binary scale lies in the choice of necessary condition(s) that define the two categories. The arbitrariness of an ordinal or interval scale lies in the choice of indicators to include as elements of the index and the choice of aggregation method to combine those indicators into a single index. If all indices are informative, they are informative in strikingly different ways. The information contained in a binary index is classificatory, that is, it groups polities in a fashion that is (arguably) theoretically and empirically fecund. The information contained in an interval index is discriminating, that is, it identifies small differences between polities that allow us to distinguish the degree to which they possess the core attribute of interest. Ordinal scales occupy a middle position in this respect. However, extant ordinal indices of democracy perform neither task very well, for reasons explained above. 2. Developing a Lexical Index The core meaning of democracy is rule by the people; on this there is little dispute. One theory of democracy, which can be traced back to E.E. Schattschneider (1942) and Joseph Schumpeter (1950), among others, proposes that the mechanism by which people exert control over political decisions is electoral. Citizens are empowered to rule through competitive elections, which allow them to select leaders and discipline those leaders, establishing relationships of responsiveness and accountability. By electoral democracy, therefore, we mean a regime where leaders are selected through contested elections held periodically before a broad electorate. Our proposed index of democracy focuses explicitly on this electoral model of democracy, sometimes referred to as a competitive, elite, minimalist, procedural, realist, thin, or Schumpeterian conception of democracy (Møller & Skaaning, 2013; Przeworski et al., 2000; Schumpeter, 1950). We are not concerned with other aspects of democracy such as civil liberties, rule of law, constraints on executive power, deliberation, or non-electoral mechanisms of participation. Electoral refers to elections, tout court. 5 Here, the term factor analysis is used in a general fashion to refer to a large class of models including principal components analysis. 4
As such, our definition of the topic is somewhat narrower than definitions of democracy adopted by most extant indices. This is especially true for indices that assume an ordinal and interval scale (e.g., PR, CL, Polity2, Contestation, Inclusiveness, UDS), which tend to range widely, including a broad range of features associated with the concept of democracy. This important definitional contrast should be highlighted from the outset, as it affects everything that follows. A lexical approach to measurement is concept-driven (Gerring et al., 2014). Thus, we begin with a survey of attributes associated with the key concept, electoral democracy, as defined. In identifying attributes for possible inclusion in our index we are mindful of the vast literature on this topic, with special attention to linguistic studies of the concept (e.g., Held, 2006; Lively, 1975; Naess et al., 1956) and foundational works in the electoral tradition (listed above). To form a lexical scale one must arrange attributes so that each serves as a necessary-andsufficient condition within an ordered scale. That is, each successive level is comprised of an additional condition, which defines the scale in a cumulative fashion. Condition A is necessary and sufficient for L1; conditions A&B are necessary and sufficient for L2; and so forth. In achieving these desiderata four criteria must be satisfied: (1) binary values for each condition, (2) unidimensionality, (3) qualitative differences, and (4) centrality or dependence (see Gerring, Skaaning, and Pemstein 2014). First, each level in the scale must be measurable in a binary fashion without recourse to arbitrary distinctions. It is either satisfied or it is not. To be sure, the construction of a binary condition may be the product of a set of necessary and/or sufficient conditions. Collectively, however, these conditions must be regarded as necessary and sufficient. Second, levels in a lexical scale must be understood as elements of a single latent (unobserved) concept. Conceptual multidimensionality must be eliminated, either by dropping the offending attribute and/or by refining the concept in a clearer and perhaps more restrictive fashion, as we have in moving from democracy to electoral democracy. Third, each level must demarcate a distinct step or threshold in a concept, not simply a matter of degrees. Levels in a lexical scale are intended to identify qualitative differences. A 3 on a lexical scale is not simply a midway station between 2 and 4. Indeed, each level may be viewed as a subtype of the larger concept. In this respect, the lexical index is reminiscent of diminished subtypes of democracy (Collier & Levitsky, 1997; Merkel, 2004). However, while subtypes revolve in a radial fashion around a central concept possessing all the attributes of the ideal-type except 5
one the lexical index is more akin to a classical concept, where new concepts are created by cumulative combinations of attributes A, A&B, A&B&C, and so forth. The most challenging aspect of lexical scale construction is the ordering of attributes, which follows a conceptual, rather than empirical, logic. One attribute may be considered prior to another if it is more central to the concept of theoretical interest (from some theoretical vantage point). This follows a constitutive approach to measurement, where attributes are the defining elements of a concept (Goertz, 2006). Alternatively, one attribute may be considered prior if it is a logical, functional, or causal prerequisite of another. The dependence of B on A is what mandates that A assume a lower level on a scale. Whether responding to considerations of centrality or dependence, the levels of a lexical scale bear an asymmetric relationship to each other; some are more fundamental than others. This is the most distinctive feature of lexical scaling. 6 Based on these considerations, we arrive at a lexical index of electoral democracy with six conditions and seven levels, as follows: L0: No elections. L1: No-party or one-party elections. L2: Multiparty elections for legislature. L3: Multiparty elections for legislature and executive. L4: Minimally competitive, multiparty elections for legislature and executive. L5: Minimally competitive, multiparty elections with full male or female suffrage for legislature and executive. L6: Minimally competitive, multiparty elections with universal suffrage for legislature and executive. Further elaboration of this minimalist approach to electoral democracy can easily be envisioned. For example, one might try to measure aspects of electoral integrity such as high respect for political liberties (see Howard & Roessler, 2006; Møller & Skaaning, 2013). For present purposes, we restrict ourselves to what might be considered the most basic properties of electoral 6 Where lexical ordering is unclear a priori (according to considerations of centrality and dependence), one is well advised to consider the shape of the empirical universe. Specifically, if A is always (or almost always) present where B is present, there may be grounds for considering A as more central or more fundamental than B. However, any conclusions reached on the basis of an exploration of empirical properties must be justified as a matter of centrality or dependence. Thus, we regard the relative prevalence of attributes as a clue to asymmetric relationships among the properties of a concept, not as a desideratum. In constructing a lexical scale, deductive considerations trump data distributions. 6
democracy. Happily, these properties are also the most easily measured, allowing for an index that stretches back in time and across all independent states. The point is that the index proposed here is not the only index of electoral democracy that might be constructed. We trust that other approaches either more detailed or more concise would nonetheless be consistent with the judgments incorporated into this index, as discussed below. Importantly, to qualify as an election (condition #1) the electorate may be quite small but must be separable from, and much larger than, the group of officials it is charged with selecting. Examples include South Africa under Apartheid and virtually all national elections in Europe and the Americas during the nineteenth century. However, the selection of a king by a legislature or estates general, typical of the Standestaat (Poggi, 1978), would not qualify, as the electorate is infinitesimal as a share of the citizenry (whom for present purposes we shall understand as permanent residents in whatever territory is claimed as sovereign), and difficult to distinguish from the chosen monarch since they both share royal blood and may all claim the title. Indirect elections count as elections unless there are multiple steps in between the electorate and the chosen representative(s), as in China today and Uganda in the 1970s. It follows that leadership positions filled through a one-stage electoral college (e.g., US presidents, chosen by an electoral college, or prime ministers chosen by an elected parliament, who serve as an electoral college) are considered elective offices. Having laid out the index, we now explore its rationale in relation to the four criteria presented above. The first criterion is that each condition be coded in a binary fashion (0/1). This criterion does little violence to reality as most of the conditions are naturally dichotomous. The exception is suffrage, a continuous variable. Note, however, that our understanding of an election presumes an electorate that is considerably larger than the body it selects and separable from that body. An election where 0.0001% of citizens qualify for the vote would not qualify as an election under our definition. In the event, one does not find any modern examples of multiparty elections for national offices in independent countries where less than 5% of the electorate can vote. After the Reform Act of 1832, demarcating the introduction of significant contestation in England, more than 650,000 males approximately nine percent of the adult population had the right to vote (Phillips & Wetherell, 1995: 414). In the United States, around 60-70% of adult white men could vote by 1790 (Keyssar, 2009: 21). Arguably, this feature of the historical record reflects a functional relationship. If the electorate is miniscule there is less need for an electoral process by which to choose leaders and establish a relationship of accountability, and even if there is a perceived need it 7
will be difficult to establish and maintain multiparty elections with a miniscule electorate (Gerring et al. forthcoming). At the other end of the spectrum, nearly universal suffrage elections (where just a few, small categories of voters are excluded) are understood as universal, and are not, in any case, a stable category. Once suffrage has been granted to nearly all men or nearly all women, it becomes very difficult and also rather pointless to maintain the barrier. Again, there seems to be a functional logic at work. Thus, we find that in polities with competitive elections but without universal male or female suffrage, female suffrage is usually 0 and male suffrage is generally between 20 and 60% of the adult male population. By setting the bar for L5 at 100% we are thus comparing full (or nearly full) male suffrage with partial male suffrage. The second criterion concerns unidimensionality, a feature that informs any index. The main challenge to this objective lies in the twin principles of inclusion and contestation, often regarded as constituting separate dimensions of electoral democracy (Dahl, 1971). Empirically, there is no question that these elements are distinct (Coppedge et al., 2008). Countries with high inclusion (as measured, e.g., by suffrage rights) may have very low contestation, or none at all. However, the lexical index is theoretically driven rather than empirically driven. Our claim is that once a minimal level of inclusion has been attained sufficient to constitute an electorate and hence the precondition for an election, as discussed further increases in suffrage are irrelevant unless and until elections are competitive. This argument will be taken up below. For the moment, we note that the claim to unidimensionality is deductive rather than inductive. The third criterion concerns qualitative differences across the identified levels. We want to claim that there is a degree of coherence to each category such that they can be considered as meaningful regime-types. That is to say, members of each category constitute a set that shares additional (unmeasured) characteristics. This claim is addressed in 4, where we connect lexical types with research drawn from the literature on democratization. Relatedly, we suppose that each step in the index is consequential, at least for some outcomes. This claim is taken up (for one particular outcome) in 7. The final criterion concerns the ordering of attributes into a lexical scale according to centrality or dependence. Recall that this is the most important and controversial aspect of lexical scaling, and its application to the concept of electoral democracy is by no means self-evident. We need to carefully explain and justify our choices. The existence of elections is judged fundamental (conditio sine qua non), as other attributes associated with electoral democracy make no sense outside of an electoral context (Collier & 8
Adcock, 1999, p. 559; Merkel, 2004, pp. 36 38). Country A is not more of an electoral democracy than Country B if neither polity holds elections, regardless of what other characteristics 7 those polities might possess. Likewise, some attributes depend upon other attributes in a logical manner. Specifically, an electoral regime is a necessary condition of multiparty elections and multiparty elections are necessary conditions of competitive elections. Moreover, a regime in which both legislature and executive are elective is arguably more democratic than a regime in which only one of these offices is elective. These features of the lexical index may be regarded as self-evident. Some of the attributes of democracy depend for their meaning on other attributes in a functional manner. The most important of these involve the relationship of inclusion and contestation, referenced above. So long as the size of an electorate is non-trivial, we regard the extent of suffrage as irrelevant to electoral democracy unless and until elections count for something. The reasoning behind this assessment returns us to the electoral theory of democracy, according to which citizens are empowered through an electoral connection. In order to establish relationships of responsiveness and accountability between officials and the citizenry, the electoral theory suggests that it is essential for political offices to be elective, for citizens do the selecting, for there to be more than one choice, and for choices occur at regular intervals (introducing the threat of electoral punishment). If these elements are not present the right of suffrage is meaningless, and apt to serve as a tool of elite control rather than one of democratic accountability. This logic is apparent in classic theoretical work in the electoral tradition (e.g., Dahl, 1971; Przeworski et al., 2000; Schattschneider, 1942; Schumpeter, 1950) and is ratified by recent empirical work (reviewed in Gandhi & Lust-Okar, 2009). To gain an intuitive sense for our prioritization of competitiveness over inclusion let us consider several examples. We begin with electoral authoritarian regimes, where universal suffrage exists but elections lack multiparty competition or the most important policymaking offices are nonelective (L1-3 in the lexical index). In our view, nothing of consequence distinguishes electoral authoritarian regimes that impose limits on suffrage from those that allow universal suffrage. Sovietera Russia is not more democratic than pre-revolutionary Russia, despite the inauguration of universal male suffrage in 1918. Likewise, if an electoral authoritarian regime like North Korea decided to restrict access to the ballot to certain classes of citizens it would hardly be any less democratic. Similarly, we regard regimes with minimal competition but restricted suffrage such as Britain during the nineteenth century as more democratic than, say, present-day Rwanda, which is 7 Such as the non-electoral powerbase or the level of civil liberties, the rule of law, or socioeconomic equality. 9
characterized by universal suffrage but not electoral competition. All of these examples seem to reinforce the notion that competitiveness stands prior to inclusion in the attainment of electoral democracy; the latter is functionally dependent upon the former. 3. Coding To code the lexical index we make use of five variables developed initially in the Political Institutions and Events (PIPE) dataset (Przeworski et al., 2013): LEGSELEC, EXSELEC, OPPOSITION, MALE SUFFRAGE, and FEMALE SUFFRAGE. Since PIPE does not attempt to measure the quality of elections, we generate a sixth variable: COMPETITION. All variables are binary, coded 1 if the following circumstances obtain, and 0 otherwise. LEGSELEC: A legislative body issues at least some laws and does not perform executive functions. The lower house (or unicameral chamber) of the legislature is at least partly elected. The legislature has not been closed. EXSELEC: The chief executive is either directly or indirectly elected (i.e., chosen by people who have been elected). OPPOSITION: The lower house (or unicameral chamber) of the legislature is (at least in part) elected by voters facing more than one choice. Specifically, parties are not banned and (a) more than one party is allowed to compete or (b) elections are nonpartisan (i.e., all candidates run without party labels). MALE SUFFRAGE: Virtually all male citizens are allowed to vote in national elections. Legal restrictions pertaining to age, criminal conviction, incompetence, and local residency are not considered. Informal restrictions such as those obtaining in the American South prior to 1965 are also not considered. 8 FEMALE SUFFRAGE: Virtually all female citizens are allowed to vote in national elections. Similar coding rules apply. COMPETITION: The chief executive offices and seats in the effective legislative body are filled by elections characterized by uncertainty (see Przeworski 2000: 16-17), meaning that the elections are, in principle, sufficiently free to enable the 8 This is consistent with usage of the suffrage concept by Schumpeter and Przeworski and also with many extant indices such as BMR. 10
opposition to gain power if they were to attract sufficient support from the electorate. This presumes that control over key executive and legislative offices is determined by elections, the executive and members of the legislature have not been unconstitutionally removed, and the legislature has not been dissolved. With respect to the electoral process, this presumes that the constitutional timing of elections has not been violated (in a more than marginal fashion), non-extremist parties are not banned, opposition candidates are generally free to participate, voters experience little systematic coercion in exercising their electoral choice, and electoral fraud does not determine who wins. With respect to the outcome, this presumes that the declared winner of executive and legislative elections reflects the votes cast by the electorate, as near as can be determined from extant sources. Incumbent turnover (as a result of multi-party elections) is regarded as a strong indicator of competition, but is neither necessary nor sufficient. 9 In addition, we rely on reports from outside observers (as reported in books, articles, and country reports) about whether the foregoing conditions have been met in a given election (see Svolik 2012: 24). Coding for this variable does not take into account whether there is a level playing field, whether all contestants gain access to funding and media, whether media coverage is unbiased, whether civil liberties are respected, or other features associated with fully free and fair elections. COMPETITION thus sets a modest threshold. Although we employ PIPE as an initial source for coding LEGSELEC, EXSELEC, OPPOSITION, MALE SUFFRAGE, and FEMALE SUFFRAGE, we deviate from PIPE based on our reading of country-specific sources in several ways. First, with respect to executive elections, in the PIPE dataset Prime ministers are always coded as elected if the legislature is open. However, for our purposes we need an indicator that also takes into account whether the government is responsible to an elected parliament if the executive is not directly elected a situation generated by a number of European monarchies prior to World War I, by episodes of 9 It is not necessary since an incumbent party can be sufficiently popular to win a long sequence of genuinely contested elections, as happened for decades in, e.g., Botswana, Japan, and Sweden. It is not sufficient because the opposition can gain power through a flawed election if the incumbents have only weak control on power or have stepped down. Moreover, the fact that the incumbents step down after a particular election, does not necessarily mean that previous elections under their leadership were competitive as it is assumed by the DD if the previous elections took place under the same electoral rules. That said, in all but a few cases executive turnover in conjunction with elections is associated with a coding of 1 for COMPETITION. 11
international supervision such as Bosnia-Herzegovina in the first years following the civil war, and by some monarchies in the Middle East and elsewhere (e.g., Liechtenstein, Monaco, and Tonga) in the contemporary era. To illustrate, PIPE codes Denmark as having executive elections from 1849 to 1900 although the parliamentary principle was not established until 1901. Before then, the government was accountable to the king. Among the current cases with elected multiparty legislatures not fulfilling this condition, we find Jordan and Morocco. In order to achieve a higher level of concept-measure consistency, we have thus recoded all country-years (based on countryspecific accounts) for this variable where our sources suggested doing so. We also conduct original coding for countries whose coding is incomplete in PIPE and for additional countries such as the German principalities that are not covered in PIPE. In this fashion, we generate a complete dataset for all six variables covering all independent countries of the world in the period under study (1800 2013). Whereas the numbers of observations for the PIPE variables range between 14,465 and 15,302, our dataset provides 18,142 observations for all variables. Except for minor adjustments regarding executive elections (mentioned above), this additional coding follows the rules laid out in the PIPE codebook. Coding decisions are based on country-specific sources that are too numerous to specify. In rare instances we stumbled upon information that required a re-coding of PIPE variables, so the two datasets do not correspond exactly. To generate the lexical index from these six binary variables, a country-year is assigned the highest score (L0 6) for which it fulfills all requisite criteria, as follows: L0: LEGSELEC=0 & EXSELEC=0. L1: LEGSELEC=1 or EXSELEC=1. L2: LEGSELEC=1 & OPPOSITION=1. L3: LEGSELEC=1 & OPPOSITION=1 & EXSELEC=1. L4: LEGSELEC=1 & OPPOSITION=1 & EXSELEC=1 & COMPETITION=1. L5: LEGSELEC=1 & OPPOSITION=1 & EXSELEC=1 & COMPETITION=1 & (MALE SUFFRAGE=1 or FEMALE SUFFRAGE=1). 10 10 In no extant cases was universal female suffrage introduced before universal male suffrage, so in practice this level is reserved for countries with male (only) suffrage. 12
L6: LEGSELEC=1 & OPPOSITION=1 & EXSELEC=1 & COMPETITION=1 & MALE SUFFRAGE=1 & FEMALE SUFFRAGE=1. Countries are coded across these conditions for the length of their sovereign existence within the 1800 2013 timespan, generating a dataset with 221 countries. To identify independent countries we rely on Gleditsch (2013) and Correlates of War (2011), supplemented from 1800 to 1815 by various country-specific sources. Importantly, electoral democracy does not presume complete sovereignty. A polity may be constrained in its actions by other states, by imperial control (as over a colony), by international treaties, or by world markets. Thus, to say that a polity is an electoral democracy is to say that it functions as such for policies over which it enjoys decisionmaking power. Scores for each indicator reflect the status of a country on the last day of the calendar year (31 December) and are not intended to reflect the mean value of an indicator across the previous 364 days. Evidently, a lexical index reduces the potential property space of the component conditions. Exactly how this works can be seen in Table 1. The first column lists all six conditions, while the second column shows the number (N) and share (percent) of total observations in our dataset that meet that criterion. Thus, the first (positive) condition the existence of elections for either the legislature or executive is satisfied in 13,584 election-years, constituting 75% of the observations in our dataset (N=18,142). The second condition multiparty elections for the legislature is satisfied in 10,583 election-years, constituting 58% of our total observations. And so forth. [Table 1 about here] Coding for the lexical index derives from these six conditions, as indicated in the second section of Table 1. A polity receives a score of 0 if the first condition is not met, i.e., there are no elections for either the legislature or the executive. All other conditions are irrelevant. This situation obtains in 4,569 country-years, constituting 25% of our dataset, as shown in the bottom row of Table 1. A polity receives a score of 1 if the first condition is met, i.e., there are national elections, but the second condition (multiparty elections for the legislature) is not satisfied. This situation obtains in 2,964 country-years, 16% of the country-years recorded in our dataset. The highest (most demanding) score of 6 is accorded to a polity that satisfies all conditions, as shown in the final column of Table 1. This situation obtains in 4,870 country years, 27% of the total observations in our dataset. In this fashion, any circumstance can be coded unambiguously into the typology. Of course, many attributes are irrelevant for this coding, as noted in Table 1. Specifically, as soon as a condition 13
is not satisfied all higher conditions become irrelevant. If a polity does not allow for multiparty elections the extent of suffrage is irrelevant, for example. This deductive quality is what distinguishes a lexical scale from a Guttman or Mokken scale. 4. Validity When contrasted with most continuous measures of democracy the lexical index is relatively simple, enhancing its transparency and reproducibility. Coding decisions are generally factual in nature, resting on institutional features that require historical knowledge but not subjective judgments on the part of the coder. To be sure, uncertainties are introduced when source material for a country is weak. But we assume that this sort of bias is random rather than systematic (as it might be if coder judgments involved questions of meaning and interpretation). In this respect, the lexical index echoes a feature of most binary indices (e.g., DD and BMR). Indeed, it is quite similar to these indices insofar as it relies on binary codings, which are combined to form a cumulative index. Another important feature of the coding procedure is its separability from other factors that sometimes confound our ability to measure political institutions. When coding democracy and governance indices particularly those that assume a continuous distribution there is a strong possibility that coders may view the state of democracy or governance in Country X as inseparable from the general state of affairs in that country, including its economic performance. When things are going well, X may receive a higher score. When things are going poorly, it may receive a lower score, even if its political institutions are substantially unchanged (Kurtz & Schrank, 2007). The coding of the lexical index offers little opportunity for this species of measurement error because coding decisions rest on clear-cut thresholds and because the features that are being coded are not amenable to state of affairs confounders. To provide an empirical check on reproducibility we conducted an inter-coder reliability test. By design, one of the authors (HB) was not involved in the construction of the index or the original coding of the dataset and was not informed of codings arrived at by the other authors or by the PIPE dataset. He was then assigned the task of re-coding twenty-two countries (10 percent of the sample), chosen at random, based on the coding rules presented above and using only countryspecific sources (which he chose based upon his review of the extant literature). Three standard statistical measures of inter-coder reliability are presented in Table 2: percent agreement, Cohen s kappa, and Krippendorff s alpha. These are calculated at the variable level (for LEGSELEC, EXSELEC, OPPOSITION, MALE SUFFRAGE, FEMALE SUFFRAGE, and 14
COMPETITION) and at the composite level (for the lexical index). All measures report high levels of inter-coder reliability, suggesting that the index is readily reproducible. It is worth noting that this conclusion applies no less to the new competition indicator, although some might consider it to be less reliable because it is less directly observable. 11 [Table 2 about here] 5. Distribution of Regime-types Over Time A frequency distribution of scores across the entire 1800 2013 period is provided in the bottom row of Table 1. It will be seen that the most populated categories are L0, L1, L3, and L6, while others (notably L5) have fewer occupants. A fairly high proportion of cases stack up at the two ends of the index, in common with many ordinal and interval indices (Cheibub et al., 2010, p. 77; Treier & Jackman, 2008). The distribution of cases changes over time, as one might expect. In order to get a feel for the application of the lexical index, we provide country scores for the median year in our sample, 1904, as shown in Table 3. At that time, there were fifty-three independent countries in the world. These were distributed fairly evenly across the seven categories of the lexical index, with the exception of the most democratic category (L6), which has only one occupant. Only Australia granted universal suffrage to both men and women, while satisfying the other criteria stipulated in the index. (New Zealand often considered as the first country to introduce universal suffrage did not become independent before 1907 according to our criteria.) [Table 3 about here] A comprehensive picture of change over time is portrayed in a stacked graph of the regimetypes across each year, shown in Figure 1. Note that our sample grows over time from 27 in 1800 to 195 in 2013 due to the appearance of newly sovereign states (e.g., in Africa) and the break-up of sovereign states (e.g., the Soviet Union). [Figure 1 about here] At an aggregate level, Figure 1 highlights those periods in which electoral democracy advanced throughout the world notably, at the end of World War I, World War II, and the Cold War as well as those periods in which it declined notably, the 1930s. The more important feature of this diagram, however, is the disaggregated picture of regime evolution it presents. By 11 In case of disagreements, we searched for additional sources and revised the coding if additional information suggested doing so. 15
decomposing the concept of electoral democracy into constituent parts we can view changes in membership across regime-types over time. In 1800 polities were predominantly of type 0 (no elections), which we call non-electoral regimes. Later in the nineteenth century we see the rise of types 1 5 and the concomitant decline of nonelectoral regimes. This is the most diverse period, when no single type is dominant, as illustrated by our snapshot of the world in 1904 (see Table 3). Over the course of the twentieth century we can see the extraordinary rise of type 1 (elections without multiparty competition), often referred to as one- and no-party regimes (Hadenius & Teorell, 2007). A steep decline for these regime-types begins in the 1980s, coincident with the Third Wave of democratization (Huntington 1991). Apart from some transitional regimes, Type 2 regimes (multi-party elections for legislature but not the executive) corresponds for the most part to what Therborn (1977: 9) has called nonparliamentary constitutional monarchies. This regime-type, widespread in nineteenth-century Europe, falls into desuetude in the contemporary era, describing just a few polities at the present time. Type 3 regimes (multiparty executive and legislative elections without real competition), a modestly sized category a century ago, began to grow in the late twentieth century to the point where it constitutes today the second-most dominant regime-type. This regime-type is similar to polities described as electoral, competitive, or limited multiparty authoritarian regimes (Schedler, 2002; Levitsky & Way, 2002; Hadenius & Teorell, 2007). We prefer the latter label since it captures the intension of the concept. Exclusive democracies and male democracies, respectively, have been suggested as plausible labels for Types 4 and 5 (see Collier & Levitsky, 1997; Merkel, 2004). With the growing illegitimacy of suffrage restrictions, these regime-types have become virtually extinct in the 21 st century, though they constituted a significant share of all polities prior to World War II. A final and equally striking pattern in evidence over the past century is the rise of type 6 regimes, the highest level of our lexical index, corresponding to polities that satisfy all assessed criteria for electoral democracy. This category, largely capturing what democratization scholars have referred to as electoral democracies (Diamond, 2002; Møller & Skaaning, 2013), now comprises over half of all polities in the world. 6. Contrasts with Extant Indices 16
Table 4 summarizes salient features of the lexical index alongside the nine extant democracy indices introduced at the outset. It will be seen that the lexical index has much broader historical coverage than DD, PR, CL, Contestation, Inclusiveness, and UDS all of which are focused on the contemporary era and slightly better coverage than Polity2, BMR, and Vanhanen s Democracy index. [Table 4 about here] As is to be expected, the lexical index generally co-varies with other indices. For example, it correlates with Polity2 at 0.80 and with the Political Rights index at 0.85 (Spearman s rho). However, when the highest scoring cases (lexical=6) are dropped from the sample these correlations drop to 0.59 and 0.42, respectively. If we split the sample, distinguishing between years before and after 1900, inter-correlations between the full lexical index and the BMR are 0.46 for the nineteenth century and 0.83 for the twentieth century, while inter-correlations with Polity2 are 0.65 and 0.82. Thus, while the lexical index overlaps with other indices of democracy it is by no means redundant. A more detailed look at the relationships between extant binary (DD, BMR) and ordinal (PR, Polity2) indices and the lexical index is portrayed in cross-tabulations in Table 5. This confirms that while various measures of electoral democracy are related, they are not very highly correlated. [Table 5 about here] One might infer that the lexical index is an outlier among democracy indices. However, a principal components analysis, shown in Table 6, reveals that this is not the case. Again, we find a striking contrast between full sample and partial sample results. In the full sample, 83 percent of the variance across these ten indices is explained by the first component. In the partial sample (Lexical<6), only 52 percent of the variance can be explained by the first component. However, in neither analysis is the lexical index an outlier, as shown in the eigenvalues. [Table 6 about here] In elucidating the distinctive features of our lexical index a useful point of comparison is provided by binary indices. The latter generally combine several of the features identified in our ordinal scale. For example, DD may be said to combine L1 4 while BMR combines L1 5, with suffrage understood as a majority of men rather than all men. In doing so, the authors suggest that a polity cannot be called an electoral democracy until it has satisfied a number of conditions though these conditions do not exactly map onto the condition utilized to score the lexical index, as shown in Table 5. 17
Our index does not take issue with this determination. However, a lexical approach to scaling suggests that polities that fail to pass all four or five of these conditions may nonetheless be regarded as partial members of the class electoral democracy. For example, a polity with elections is closer to the electoral ideal than a polity without elections. And it suggests that this distinction along with others identified along the seven-level index has consequences, consequences that can be understood as greater/lesser possession of various traits associated with electoral democracy. Thus, rather than insisting that a number of necessary conditions be met, we regard each condition as providing a threshold on a single ordinal scale. Clearly, the lexical index allows one to represent more information than is possible in a binary scale. At the same time, the sensitivity of a seven-level ordinal scale is lower than that provided by a longer ordinal scale (e.g., Polity) and much lower than an interval scale (e.g., UDS). In terms of discriminatory ability, the lexical index occupies a midway point. The advantage of lexical scaling relative to more differentiated ordinal scales or interval scales is in clarity. While the latter are derived from complex models (e.g., UDS) or less formulaic but often opaque weightings across dimensions (e.g., Freedom House and Polity), the lexical value affixed to a country in a particular year is immediately interpretable. We know what a 5 means because there is only one combination of attributes that will yield a score of 5 on a lexical scale. Likewise, we can understand the categories of the scale as indicating discrete regime-types, which can be tracked through time, as in Figure 1. By way of contrast, longer ordinal scales (e.g., Polity) and interval indices (e.g., UDS) allow one to track the overall trends more or less democracy through time by examining changes in the mean over time. But they cannot indicate anything about the specific content (quality) of regimes or about which regime-types expanded or contracted at different points in time. The latter information is both substantively important as well as useful for tracing causal mechanisms, as discussed below. 7. The Lexical Index at Work: Democracy and State Repression One purpose of the lexical index of electoral democracy is descriptive: to differentiate regime-types in the world (Table 2) and to portray changes over time (Figure 1). Another use is to probe causal relationships between regime-type and other factors. As an example of this sort of work we shall explore the relationship between regime-type and state repression of personal integrity rights (Davenport & Armstrong, 2004). 18